UTF-16 is fine for the vast majority of Chinese characters. It has been standard since 2008 for C++ (at least for code that wants to be running on windows; Microsoft moved everything to w_string back then).
C# uses UTF-16 natively for strings.
Dunno about other languages
does chinese code take up less space? wait how many bytes does it take to encode a chinese character? is it just UTF-8 or is it something else
UTF-16 is fine for the vast majority of Chinese characters. It has been standard since 2008 for C++ (at least for code that wants to be running on windows; Microsoft moved everything to w_string back then).
C# uses UTF-16 natively for strings.
Dunno about other languages